School of Divinity Master’s Theses and Projects Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity
Winter 2015
Creation and Participation: The Metaphysical
Structure of the World-God Relation in Aquinas
Byron Stefan HaganUniversity of St. Thomas, Minnesota, thebyronicman88@gmail.com
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Hagan, Byron Stefan, "Creation and Participation: The Metaphysical Structure of the World-God Relation in Aquinas" (2015).School of Divinity Master’s Theses and Projects. 13.
Creation and Participation: The Metaphysical Structure of the World-God Relation in Aquinas
A THESIS
Submitted to the Faculty of the School of Divinity Of the University of St. Thomas
In partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree
Master of Arts in Theology © 2015
All Rights Reserved (Byron Stefan Hagan)
St. Paul, MN (2015)
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ... 3
Overview: Creation and Participation in Aquinas ... 3
CHAPTER 1. Participation: Aquinas and his Sources ... 10
1.1. Greek Theogonic Cosmogony and Pythagoreanism: the Limited/Unlimited and analogy 10 1.2. Plato: participation and the theory of Forms... 12
1.2.1. Platonic hyper-realism: participation in the separate Forms... 14
1.2.2. Plato and analogy ... 16
1.2.3. The “grounding problem” in Plato: difficulties for his notion of participation ... 19
1.3. Aristotle: the turn to the world: substantiality and formal immanence ... 20
1.3.1. Aristotle and Aquinas: the First Cause and participation ... 22
1.3.2. The “non-Aristotelian” nature of Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s act-potency scheme ... 23
CHAPTER 2: Analysis of Principle Texts in Aquinas with respect to the Development of the Idea of Participation in His Thought ... 26
Introduction: Participation and substantiality: De Veritate, q.21, a.5; In De hebdomadibus ... 26
2.1. In De Hebdomadibus: Substantiality and participation: how things are good... 28
2.2. Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 5; q. 44: securing the convertibility of ‘bonum’ and ‘ens’ ... 38
2.2.1. Summa Theologiae I,5: esse as universal perfection; the self-denomination of the good... 39
2.2.2. Summa theologiae q.44: the two-tiered hierarchy of being—creator and created ... 42
2.3. In Liber de causis, propositions 1 and 3: the intensive principle of being ... 45
2.4. Quodlibet II, q.2, a.1. Esse from accident to actuality: the participation-structure of being ... 49
2.5. Summa contra Gentiles III ... 55
C. 64: the good ordering of the world as hierarchical participation in the goodness of the First Cause (God) ... 55
C. 66: the order of causes subordinated by participation in the First Cause ... 58
C. 69: how by participation creatures are established as true causes in their own order ... 59
CHAPTER 3: Participation in Thomas Aquinas and in Thomism: Esse as the Act of Being ... 61
3.1. Participation in Aquinas: a summary overview ... 61
3.2. The different kinds of participation ... 63
3.3. The Participatory Structure of Being: Exemplarity, composition, simple act of creation . 69 CONCLUSION ... 79
INTRODUCTION
Overview: Creation and Participation in Aquinas
The term “participation” as we are principally concerned with it in the metaphysical scheme of Aquinas is a conceptually compact term that signifies the package of relations forming a structure of dependence between the manifold of inferior subjects and the higher source of their similitude or nature. Although the notion can be and is applied in the thought of Aquinas in a number of ways, Thomistic participation is most properly understood as the expression of the dependence relation of creatures to God,1 a relation exemplified by a metaphysical structure open to analysis by the philosopher or theologian sufficiently trained in the general science of created being, that is, metaphysics. Participation is the way in which created beings are related to God and receptive of divine causality—the most superior and most transcendental type of cause. Aquinas’s mature doctrine of participation is an original synthesis operating on two intertwining and mutually interpreting planes of thought: the philosophical, where Aquinas synthesizes the principle metaphysical concerns of Plato and Platonism (pagan Greek, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian sources) and the critical revision of Plato that is the achievement of Aristotle;2 the theological, where the Angelic Doctor grants a metaphysical certification to key moments of Catholic dogma and the Christian tradition of Biblical interpretation in the Fathers of the Church as well as his scholastic predecessors—always with those dogmatic commitments in
1 W. Norris Clarke, “The Meaning of Participation in St. Thomas” (Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association, Vol. 26 [1952], 147-157), 152. I am also deeply indebted, throughout this thesis, to Stephen A. Hipp, S.T.D.: for technical criticism and guidance as to both the form and content of this work, and for considerable tutelage on general and specific questions in the metaphysical theology of Aquinas, including sources and reception history.
2 The notion that Aristotle (and therefore Aquinas) is a revising Platonist, once a novel thesis, had received by the nineteen-sixties
an imprimatur by no less an establishment figure than Frederick Copleston (A History of Philosophy, Vol. II: Augustine to Scotus, Image ed. New York: Image Books, 1985). “One [could] regard the achievement of St. Thomas, not so much as an adoption of Aristotle in place of Augustine or of neo-Platonism, but rather as a confluence and synthesis of the various currents of Greek philosophy, and of Islamic and Jewish philosophy, as well as of the original ideas contributed by Christian thinkers…This line of interpretation seems to me to be perfectly legitimate, and it has the great advantage of not leading to a distorted idea of [Aquinas’s thought] as a pure Aristotelianism. It would even be…legitimate to look on [Aquinas’s thought] as an Aristotelianised Platonism rather than as a Platonised Aristotelianism” (563).
view—especially as regards the doctrine of the creation of the world immediately and ex nihilo
by God.3 “For us, Christians, it is indubitably certain that everything that exists in the world is created by God.”4 The idea of creation in its Christian form is a conception that pervades and controls the metaphysical thought of St. Thomas from start to finish, even though as operative meta-doctrine it remains unthematized in the texts.5 Creation for Aquinas “is the notion that nothing exists which is not creatura, except the Creator Himself...[and] this created-ness determines entirely and all-pervasively the inner structure of the creature.”6 The idea of creation and the idea of participation go together: the metaphysics of Aquinas is creationist-participatory metaphysics which, though he is a great analyzer of concepts, remains for him an “existential” mode of thought, that is, a philosophy of being (ens). By means of an analysis of the metaphysical structure of being and beings in terms of participation Aquinas arrives at a conception of a God who, as the first and supreme cause of the world, is both transcendent of it and immanent in it, such that the world is a manifold of created natures at once utterly under divine governance and free in their own order.7
3 Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought [St. Louis, Mo: Herder, 1950; reprint with different
pagination Ex Fontibus Co., 2012]) recognized the importance of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo for Aquinas as a “guiding star,” like all revelation in Aquinas’s philosophy. “The revealed doctrine of free creation ex nihilo was, in particular, a precious guide” (48). Garrigou does demonstrate a critical sense of the way in which this makes a difference for Aquinas, but Thomism would require the work of Cornelio Fabro to see the profundity of the historical achievement of Aquinas with regard to the structure of created being laid bare.
4 Aquinas, In Symbolum Apostolorum, a.1. Eng. trans. Rudi A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 117.
5 Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays (Eng. trans. Pantheon, 1957; reprint, South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press,
1999). “An unexpressed assumption, not explicitly formulated” (47). Writing from the standpoint of the mid-twentieth century, Pieper famously notes that the theme of creation, what I am calling an operative meta-doctrine, “has remained so unnoticed that the textbook interpretations of St. Thomas hardly once mention it” (48). Pieper is here referring to the “Neoscholastic” manual tradition which grew up rapidly in the wake of the reassertion of the primacy of Aquinas as a model for Catholic theology in Pope Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris of 1879.
6 Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays (Eng. trans. Pantheon, 1957; reprint, South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press,
1999), 47.
John F. Wippel, in his magisterial overview of the metaphysics of Aquinas,8 opens his chapter on participation by summarily rehearsing the history of twentieth-century Thomistic scholarship. Within the first sixty years of the past century a number of “keys” to the metaphysical vision of Aquinas were uncovered and thematized: the real distinction between essence and existence, the real division of being into act and potency, the idea of analogy and the “analogicity of being,” and the primacy of existence, have all taken their places as central issues of interpretation in various contemporary Thomisms. In our time the doctrine of the transcendentals is coming increasingly to the fore. It is the idea of participation, however, is now generally recognized as the dominant metaphysical vision running through the thought-world of the Angel of the Schools. As fundamental as is the idea of analogy for making intelligible the notion of being as it is applied both to the unity of being (the one) and to the differences in being (the many),9 even “more fundamental, however, from the metaphysician’s standpoint, is the issue of unity and multiplicity as it obtains within the realm of existing beings themselves.”10
In Aquinas’s metaphysics of participation he is concerned to account for the actual existence of the manifold of beings which, though diverse, share in the universal perfection of being.11 For Aquinas the created world is a finite participation in the infinite being of the First Cause, God. Creation is constituted as a similitude of the divine being ordered hierarchically according to degrees of participation in the divine being. Each being and each class of being in the hierarchy is distinguished one from another “according to the degree to which each approximates to the
8 John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 94.
9 For an excellent treatment of the meaning and import of analogy for the Christian necessity of divine naming, including the
relationship of analogy to metaphysical participation, see Philip A. Rolnick, Analogical Possibilities: How Words Refer to God (Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press, 1993), especially chapter two, “The Metaphysics of Participation.”
10 John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 95. What is compared here is the notion or concept of being and being itself.
11 John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, D.C.:
full perfection of God,”12 whose metaphysical name is “Being Itself Subsisting Through Itself” (Ipsum Esse Per Se Subsistens).13
The scope and content of this thesis
The thought of Aquinas is controlled by metaphysical principles derived from Platonic and Aristotelian sources, and the idea of participation exercises dominant influence as a master controlling principle of Aquinas’s metaphysical vision. Present from the very earliest period of Aquinas’s writing life, the notion of participation becomes especially pronounced in his mature period. In this thesis I treat first of the historical sources of Aquinas’s participatory doctrine, showing a development that prepared the ground for Aquinas’s grand synthesis. I proceed then to a discussion of the general importance of participation in the thought of Aquinas, respecting the various contexts in which the doctrine appears most prominently and highlighting in each case the end to which Aquinas employs it. Next comes a discussion of principle texts in Aquinas in which the doctrine is operative, followed by a pause in which I will collate the principle defining features of participation in the metaphysics of the Angelic Doctor. Following this comes a clarifying and comparative section on the different kinds of participation as we find them operative in Aquinas, concluding with a section on a major moment of contemporary debate concerning the notion of participation in Aquinas’s oeuvre: the question of metaphysical composition of creatures, the role of the divine ideas as exemplary causes of creatures, and the simplicity of the act of creation.
Chapter I: Participation: Aquinas and his sources. I have spoken of the importance of the idea of creation and participation in the history of philosophy for understanding not only the
12 Rudi A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 282.
13 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q.4, a.2 resp. As the translation of the English Dominicans (Benziger Bros. 1947-48) has it,
thought of Aquinas on participation—because the idea characterizes his intellectual world—but also for understanding of the place of St. Thomas in a general history of thought. The first section of this work is dedicated to summary overview of participation in Greek and Hellenistic pagan pre-rationalism and philosophy. I trace the idea from Pythagoreanism to Plato, Aristotle, and the pagan Neoplatonist Proclus and the Plotinus-influenced Proclean work by an unknown author, the Liber de causis. The Christian Neoplatonists Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius are engaged in the textual study of Aquinas that makes the matter of chapter two.
Chapter II: Analysis of principle texts in Aquinas. In chapter two I will present the position of Cornelio Fabro and Rudi A. te Velde that there exists in Aquinas a significant development in thought with reference to the role of participation in the metaphysical structure of created being, the history of Aquinas’s own notion of being. This history is tracked in its essence through the texts of Aquinas’s commentary on the De hebdomadibus of Boethius (In librum Boetii De hebdomadibus expositio, 1256-59), the Disputed Questions on Truth (Questiones Disputatae De veritate, 1256-59), the Disputed Questions on the Power of God (De Potentia Dei, 1265-66), the
Commentary on the Liber de causis (1272), the Prima pars of the Summa Theologiae (1266-68),14 which on this interpretation represents the mature synthesis of Aquinas’s participatory metaphysical vision, the height of its articulation. I then move on to the Quodlibet II (1268-72), a product of the second Parisian regency and concurrent with the subsequent parts of the Summa Theologiae. Finally, three texts from the Summa contra Gentiles III (1260-1264) will be
14 In dating these works I follow Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas. Volume 1: The Person and His Work, revised ed.
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005). I treat them in a general chronological order since part of the thesis involves a claim to a development which aims to highlight the Angelic Doctor’s ever-deepening engagement with Neoplatonism over the course of his career. The one exception to my chronological order of treatment is the Commentary on the Liber de Causis, which, written in 1272, would post-date the Prima pars of the Summa Theologiae by about four years, but is nevertheless treated in this thesis prior to the Summa Theologiae. This need not undermine the case for development, however, since Aquinas had long been acquainted with the Liber, having employed principles drawn from it at least as early as De Ente et essentia (1252-56), where he gives three citations, one in c.3 and two in c.4. Thus Aquinas from an early point in his career imbibes the Neoplatonism of the De causis, and his interest in incorporating such thinking into the Prima pars is evidenced by the concurrence of his work on the Prima with the Commentary on the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius, both dated to the regency in Rome of 1265-68.
discussed, one which deals with participation and divine providence in general, and the other two which deal with the world of secondary causes in relation to God the first cause. Of course all along the way I will have recourse to numerous other texts in Aquinas which will serve to aid our understanding of his meaning. It seems that we can reduce the works treated here to two general and fundamental periods, then: that of the first Parisian regency of 1256-1259, and the period of the Summa Theologiae of 1266-1272.
The development in conception between the first period and the second can be summarized as a movement from the consideration of the essence/suppositum as the primary instance and subject of esse (where esse is conceived as a quasi-accident), to a reconsideration of esse as the super-formal, universal perfection of the essence, the “act of being” (actus essendi) in which all beings except the First Being (God) participate.
Chapter III: Participation in St. Thomas and Thomism. In this chapter I will collate the principle defining features of participation in the thought of Aquinas. I begin by noting the characteristic metaphysical insights of two major figures in 20th century Thomism in order to highlight the development of interpretation in the last century. John F.X. Knasas cites an unnamed but “well-known expositor of St. Thomas” who claimed that “only in [the 20th] century have we finally understood Aquinas.”15 While the statement is hyperbolic, it is meaningful: the re-evaluation of Aquinas’s metaphysics in terms of the doctrine of esse as actus essendi is the major moment in the “existential” interpretation out of which the participatory interpretation grows, and this discovery is a result of 20th century scholarship. I then proceed to set forth the basic properties of the participation relationship between the created order and God, attending to some definitions of important terms.
Next I proceed to clarify and compare the four main classes of relation in the science of being with reference to the participatory element. These are: genus-species-individual, matter-form, substance-accident, essence-esse.
Finally in this chapter I explore the participatory structure of being with respect to the act of creation in its simplicity, and I do this in the context of mediating a key dispute among some major contemporary interpreters of Aquinas who have written on participation in his thought, and this with respect to the essence-esse distinction and the problem of composition. The main concern here is the one thematized by Rudi te Velde, commenting on a problem raised by L.-B. Geiger: the radical simplicity of the act of creation ex nihilo, argues te Velde, has certain implications for the structure of created beings as composed, and therefore for our understanding of the esse-essence distinction, that have yet to be fully appreciated in the contemporary literature. In short, this dispute has to do with the place of the essence in Aquinas’s metaphysical scheme as we see it in his second (“mature”) period, and its relation to the divine ideas as exemplar causes. Some contemporary commentators have interpreted Aquinas to hold to a “double participation,” that is, one participation in the divine being, and one in the exemplarity of the divine ideas, that is, the source of the intelligible essences in the divine mind which produce the limitation in creatures of otherwise unlimited divine act. Herein we summarize the pertinent arguments, arguments that add up to a rejection of a crucial 20th century consensus interpretation of Aquinas’s analysis of the being of composed creatures—that of the limitation of infinite esse in creatures by distinct receiving essence—and represent a synthetic solution which preserves the prior consensus. The view I shall defend in this section is that Gregory T. Doolan has successfully shown a way out of the Geiger-te Velde dilemma by demonstrating that it is a false one, based on an erroneous reading of the role the divine ideas play in Aquinas: for
Aquinas, created beings do not participate in their divine ideas at all, but rather are exactly like their corresponding ideas. The divine ideas represent the ability of the divine being to be participated, but in the end it is only the divine being itself that is and can be participated by creatures. Therefore there just is no problem of “double participation”, and the traditional Thomistic interpretation, that act is not limited except by a distinct receiving essence, is preserved.
CHAPTER 1. Participation: Aquinas and his Sources
1.1. Greek Theogonic Cosmogony and Pythagoreanism: the Limited/Unlimited and analogy
The notion of participation in Greek philosophy can be traced at least as far back as the Pythagoreans, although this is a dark history indeed, cobbled together as it is from fragments of documentation marked by an admixture of legend and hearsay that at times comes near to mythology. There is a reception of Pythagoreanism in Greek thought, however, and this reception combined with reflection on the mythological tradition can yield some basic conclusions.
In Pythagoreanism the finite world is (somehow) a participation in the eternal, Blessed Triangularity, as it were. How does this come about? The root of Greek philosophical thought, the origin of the Hellenic mind, springs from the meditation on nature in her organic materiality. The material world is a flux of being, but underlying, or rather, overarching the flux, must be a more primary world of permanence, or at least eternally recurring reality that constitutes the changeless basis for the flux. “Changelessness…is associated [with] increased, and, consequently, more extensive causal power.”16 Certain men of vision, in meditating on the
16 A.I. Pierris, “Origin and Nature of Early Pythagorean Cosmogony,” Pythagorean Philosophy, K.I. Boudouris, (ed.), Athens:
International Center for the Study of Greek Philosophy and Culture (1992), 126. Pierris gives all the fascinating background and literary documentation we would love to unfold here, but which is impossible given the limits of our study.
cosmogonies birthed by the Hellenic mystery religions, begin to become philosophers. Inheritors of the theogonies of “orphic” origin as well as that of Hesiod, the first philosophers moved to explain the flux in terms of a higher order.
There begins a migration from a mere cultic-mythological consciousness toward philosophical contemplation of the primordial antinomies, ordered pairs of opposites. The most primordial are peras (πέρας) and apeiron (ἄπειροv). Peras is fatherhood/masculinity, light, aethereality/spiritual determinateness, form, limitation, boundedness/finitude—and it equals
intelligibility; apeiron is motherhood/femininity, darkness, cthonic/material indeterminateness, potency-as-source-of-actuality-and-possibility, illimitation, unboundedness/infinitude—and it equals unintelligibility.
The philosophical move from the organic antinomy to the mathematical antinomy is apparent: the indeterminable chaos of ἄπειροv is organized by the formal intelligibility of the geometric πέρας, its perfection in the “ten-ness” (the Decad)17 of the sacred, triangular
tetraktys.18 Aristotle is “our most comprehensive early source for the history of Pythagoreanism,” and the Stagirite “differentiated two groups of Pythagoreans along methodological lines.”19 As Aristotle avers (987b7-18), it is the mathematikoi that are of primary interest in the metaphysics of Plato, and therefore of the legacy of the notion of participation. The limited/unlimited duality is, together with participation itself—an idea with which it is necessarily bound up—perhaps the first and most important philosophical notion in the history of thought, a conception that rings down the ages and resonates forcefully throughout the history of philosophy and in this present study.
17 Plato, Laws 737e1-738b3; Critias, 113e.
18 Cf. A.I. Pierris, “Origin and Nature of Early Pythagorean Cosmogony,” Pythagorean Philosophy, K.I. Boudouris, (ed.),
Athens: International Center for the Study of Greek Philosophy and Culture (1992), 126-162. Cff. Aristotle, Metaphysics A, for the Stagirite’s history of Greek philosophy, especially 985b23-990a29 where he reviews the two schools of Pythagoreanism, the acousmatics (οἱ ἀκουσματικοί) and the mathematicians (οἱ μαθηματικοί).
1.2. Plato: participation and the theory of Forms
The founder of the Athenian Academy is best known for his theory of Forms. This theory constitutes a significant part of Aquinas’s interest in Plato and Platonism.20 In Plato’s metaphysics, the theory of Forms or Ideas21 is put forward to account for the problem of the one
20 Plato speaks directly to the 13th c. in only three works, and those in Latin translation: Meno, Phaedo, and Timaeus. Yet, even
though Aquinas refers to these three works by name in his writings, it is doubtful that he had actually read Meno and Phaedo for himself and not at all clear whether he had even read the Timaeus directly (R. J. HenleSaint Thomas and Platonism; A Study of the Plato and Platonici Texts in the Writings of Saint Thomas [The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956], 422). Aquinas knows of the existence of these works but his knowledge of Platonism is that of Plato’s interpreters in the pagan and Christian traditions. St. Thomas’s own “exemplarism” is clearly influenced by the great Neoplatonists of the Christian tradition such as Augustine, Ps-Dionysius, and William of Auvergne, as well as the pagan writers Proclus and Macrobius and the anonymous author of the Liber de Causis (Gregory T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplary Causes [Wash. D.C.: CUA Press, 2008], 32fn72). But the interpreter of Plato most influential upon Aquinas is undoubtedly Aristotle in his Metaphysics (R. J. HenleSaint Thomas and Platonism; A Study of the Plato and Platonici Texts in the Writings of Saint Thomas [The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956], 422). In this text, however, Aristotle only criticizes Plato according to what he has said about the Forms in the Phaedo, and this is the text in which the existence of the Form (of the Beautiful, in this case) “itself by itself” (αὐτό κάθ᾽ αὑτά) is put forward in unadulterated earnestness (Plato, Phaedo, 100d-e). Yet this is an incomplete and overly simplified and monolithic reading of Plato by Aristotle, a too-convenient because self-serving reduction of the ambiguous complexity and sprawling profundity of the theory of Forms. This Aristotelian estimate of Plato is for Aquinas, however, just the view of Plato on the question of exemplarity: that the self-existent Forms cause the being of other things by bringing them to exist by formal participation, without reference to efficient causality, which is to say, formal immanence.
21 On the usage of English translations and transliterations of Platonic philosophical terms: Lewis Campbell (Plato’s Republic:
The Greek Text, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894) gives us this warning: “In Plato…philosophical terminology is incipient, tentative, transitional” (cited in R. C. Cross, “Logos and Forms in Plato,” in Mind, New Series, Vol. 63, No. 252 [Oct. 1954], 436). Yet there is sufficient stability of usage in Plato and the tradition and we can recognize the following Greek terms with their English transliterations that stand for “the Forms” or refer to the formal notion: ‘Ideas’, ( or ‘archetypes’, ‘paradigms’ when the Forms are referred to in their role as ‘exemplars’), in a related sense, schema (what is ‘common’ [τί ἐστι σχῆμα] among diverse things)—and in the Latin tradition, ‘universal’, although when using this term ‘universal’ we should exercise some reserve: Joseph Owens (“Thomistic Common Nature and the Platonic Idea,” Mediaeval Studies 21, 1959) argues that although Aquinas interprets the Platonic Ideas as universals—hence the synonymy of the two terms in subsequent thought—Plato’s Ideas themselves correspond more closely to Aquinas’ notion of ‘common nature’, a related but different notion (218-221, in Gregory T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplary Causes [Wash. D.C.: CUA Press, 2008], 33fn74). This view is in general harmony, I believe, with that of R.C. Cross and Eric D. Perl (although Perl does use the term “universal nature”), two writers whose views on the Platonic doctrine of Forms are discussed just below. At least Cross and Perl prefer to think of the Platonic “Form” as ‘nature’—the common “quality” of which the various res of common being are instances.
In later Neoplatonic writing the term ‘logos’ and its plural ‘logoi’ come into usage in close or even synonymous connection with the Forms/Ideas. This is a development and not the usage of Plato. In Plato himself, rather, “logos” stands generally not for the Form itself but for the verbal/grammatical statement or account by which it is known: “The εἶδος…is displayed in the logos…in the predicate of the logos” (R. C. Cross, “Logos and Forms in Plato,” 447-448). As Cross argues, “the form is displayed in the predicate” of the logos, and so when any ‘What is X’ question is asked, the answer is the logos and thus the predicate contains the εἶδος. It is more “correct to say that we talk with εἴδη and logoi, pieces of talk, [which] are necessary to display εἴδη to us” (Cross, “Logos and Forms,” 447). This view bolsters the interpretation of Plato that we give here, that, however much a lofty theological thinker he may be, he has also a profound and abiding concern for conceptual clarity based on logical analysis of the “way we talk” about things. In Plato the ‘form’ does not appear as the subject of the logos, that is, not as the “substantial entity” that is under discussion, but rather as the predicate of the logos, such that the logos is rather more like a “formula”, “what is said of something, not something about which something is said” (Cross, “Logos and Forms,” 449). Thus for Cross the typical and fundamental meaning of εἶδος orἰδέα in Plato is “quality.” It is revealed in the discussion in the Theatetus (Socrates’ “dream” 202b ff) that the true (hypostatic?) subject of the logos, however—some one of the original elements (στοιχεῖα)—can only be named “in itself” but not known under any concept, since it is a simple entity and is that by which other complex things (συλλαβάς) are known. The στοιχεῖα can be “perceived” (αἰσθητά), however, by intuition (abstraction?) through the “syllables,” the complex wholes or sensibles which carry instances of the separately existing elements. Still—is the reference here really to the hypostases (separately existent Ideas) or merely the most fundamental notions from which concepts are formed (like Aristotle’s ‘first principles’) or both?
and the many, that is, the challenge of explaining how it is that the existence of a given quality or characteristic that is itself one can be in many subjects.22 “The problem of the one and many is one of the enigmas of reality which has exercised the intellect of man since the beginning of human thought.”23 The project of reducing the many to the one is perhaps the essence of the entire philosophical enterprise considered across time,24 in a certain way just what it means to think. Plato finds himself in a maturing Greek philosophical context which is committed to schematizing the phenomena of common experience on the conviction (the first philosophical intuition) that the world is an ordered whole (κόσμος) which is available to rational analysis and reducible to concepts expressible in language.25
Plato inherits from Socrates the search for the stated definition (λόγοι, or sometimes, σχῆμα) that reveals the Form (εἶδος), that is, the principle of unity to which plurality and diversity must
Eric D. Perl (“The Presence of the Paradigm: Immanence and Transcendence in Plato’s Theory of Forms,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 53, No. 2 [Dec. 1999], 339-362) argues for a return to the “traditional” reading of Plato, that the instance-Idea relation is one of immanence-in-transcendence and transcendence-in-immanence: transcendent because immanent and immanent because transcendent. “The forms are separate, not here, in the world experienced with the senses, in that they are not members of it; but they are here in that they are the very natures which sensible things have and display. And it is in this sense that everything we encounter with our senses is not reality itself but an image, an appearance, a presentation, of the intelligible, eternal, divine reality” (Perl, “Immanence and Transcendence,” 362).
Perl and Cross both argue against the “traditional” (modern academic) interpretation of Plato in different and special senses, such that their views are complementary. Perl advocates for a return to the ancient (neo) platonic “tradition” of the immanence-in-transcendence of the Forms as the abiding view of Plato (because logically necessary) as against the modern “tradition”, where interpreters generally recognize a development in Plato’s thought from an early Socratic immanence to a middle period (and Timaeus) in which Plato moves to a doctrine of separateness or “transcendence.” Cross argues also against modern interpreters (and Neoplatonic ones who use the term logos in connection with the hypostases) but in the sense that he sees a real difference between ‘logos’ and ‘idea’—these are not synonyms. Rather, logoi are where eide are made to appear—the “talk” wherein eide are revealed. Thus if the forms were truly “part of the world” they could be spoken of as part of common being, which is to say, with univocality, and thus transcendental analogy would be unnecessary. But they are not, and thus we must have recourse to analogy.
22 Cf. Plato, Philebus (14c), where Socrates identifies “this principle…which somehow has an amazing nature. For that the many
are one and the one many are amazing statements, and can easily be disputed, whichever side of the two one may want to defend.”
23 Thomas A. Fay, “Participation: The Transformation of Platonic and Neoplatonic Thought In the Metaphysics of Aquinas”
Divus Thomas 76 (1973), 53.
24 Bernard Montagnes (The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being According to Thomas Aquinas, orig. French ed. 1963, Eng. trans.
Andrew Tallon [Milwaukee, Wis: Marquette University Press, 2004], 12) says this outright in the clearest possible terms: “…the fundamental object of philosophy is to reduce the many to the one.”
25 Samuel Sambursky, The Physical World of the Greeks (London: Routledge and Paul, 1956). Cited in Robin Waterfield,
“Introduction,”, in The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xii. Cf. Pierre Duhem, especially ch. 1 “Greek Science,” in his short but crucial early work in the philosophy and history of science, To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory From Plato to Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969, orig. French ed. SOZEIN TA PHAINOMENA, essai sur la notion de théorie physique de Platon à Galilée, Paris: Hermann, 1908).
be reduced.26 Plato’s theory of Forms can be thought of as an attempt to answer a twofold question: why must the many derive from one, and how is this derivation possible, i.e., what is the structure of the derivation?27
1.2.1. Platonic hyper-realism: participation in the separate Forms28
For Plato (with qualification) and Platonism, the intelligible is the real, and a Form is the ultimate intelligible, existing “itself by itself” (αὐτό κάθ᾽ αὑτά) immateriallyas a hypostasis, a separate being, or in Aristotelian terms, something “not in a subject”29 with the addition of being separate from matter, in Latin terminology, substantia separata.30 The Forms, as the intelligible bases of phenomenal experience in the material world, are the “really real,” the permanent and eternal, which on account of their absolute character are able to impart reality to the world of material-sensible things-in-flux, which, when compared to the world of absolute Forms, is only vague image and shadow.31
The relationship between the universal causes, which are the Forms, and finite, concrete effects is given by Plato in terms of “participation” (usually from the μετέχειν/μέθεξις word group, sometimes the κοινωνεῖν/κοινωνία group when the emphasis is especially on “having in
26 Plato, Meno, 72a-b ff, to locate just one example of the “What is X” elenchi in Plato. In the Republic, “What is justice?” In the
Theatetus, “What is knowledge?” etc. R.C. Cross (“Logos and Forms in Plato,” in Mind, New Series, Vol. 63, No. 252 [Oct. 1954], 441-442) remarks, helpfully, that “it is quite clear in the Meno and elsewhere that when he asks this ‘what is X’ question, he is taking it for granted that there is a form of X, and wanting to know what that form is. And…from what he says it seems that he hopes to achieve this coming to know the form by way of statements, logoi.”
27 Maria Luisa Gatti, “Plotinus: The Platonic Tradition and the foundation of Neoplatonism,” in Lloyd P. Gerson ed., The
Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28.
28 R.J. Henle’s discussion of Aquinas’s critique of the exaggeration of Platonic realism comes under the heading “The
Transposition of Abstractions into Reality” (Saint Thomas and Platonism; A Study of the Plato and Platonici Texts in the Writings of Saint Thomas, The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956).
29 Aristotle, Metaphysics V (), 8 (1017b10); cf. Posterior Analytics I, 4 (73b5).
30 “The Naturalists transfer the structure of reality, which they have determined as material, to the soul; Plato transfers the
structure of knowledge, which he has seen to be immaterial, to reality” (R. J. Henle, Saint Thomas and Platonism; A Study of the Plato and Platonici Texts in the Writings of Saint Thomas [The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956], 326). Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q.84, a.2 resp. “The ancient philosophers held that the soul knows bodies through its essence. For it was universally admitted that ‘like is known by like.’ But they thought that the form of the thing known is in the knower in the same mode as in the thing known. The Platonists however were of a contrary opinion. For Plato, having observed that the intellectual soul has an immaterial nature, and an immaterial mode of knowledge, held that the forms of things known subsist immaterially.”
31 Some loci classici for Plato’s theory of Forms are Phaedo 100a-101b; Cratylus 439c-440b; Phaedrus 246a-250a; Symposium
common”).32 Speaking merely of common usage, we should notice that the Greek verb
metechein cannot be literally translated into the Latin participare, however, which term as Leo Sweeney points out can be “in philosophical contexts…very misleading.”33 The Latin verb means ‘to take a part’ (partem capere) and in the concrete this is not the Greek sense. Rather,
metechein connotes a relationship of mutual having, or as Sweeney puts it, “to have along with, to have in common (koinonein) with,” and by inference, “to be dependent on, to be in relationship with.”34 While the metaphysical systems of Plato and Aquinas will be shown to be profoundly different, nevertheless it is the case that despite the concrete differences in non-metaphysical semantics between the Greek metechein that Plato uses and the Latin participare of Aquinas, the meaning of Aquinas will be that of Plato’s Greek: relationship of dependence by (analogical) sharing.35
Participation for Plato (as it will be for Aquinas) also entails the attempt to show how the multiplicity and commonality of effects can be derived from formal, intelligible unity. Put another way, participation for Plato is an explanation of the relationship of concrete and singular objects of sense with their principles of intelligibility.36 Participation is the structure of the relationship (ἀνάλογον) between the One and the many,37 and this relationship is one of a mutual
32 F. Hauck, “κοινός,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Kittel, Gerhard, Gerhard Friedrich, and Geoffrey
William Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans, 1985), 789-808.
33 Leo Sweeney, “Participation in Plato’s Dialogues: Phaedo, Parmenides, Sophist and Timaeus,” in The New Scholasticism, Vol.
62, Issue 2 (Spring 1988), 126.
34 Leo Sweeney, “Participation in Plato’s Dialogues: Phaedo, Parmenides, Sophist and Timaeus,” in The New Scholasticism, Vol.
62, Issue 2 (Spring 1988), 126.
35 Leo Sweeney (“Participation in Plato’s Dialogues: Phaedo, Parmenides, Sophist and Timaeus,” in The New Scholasticism, Vol.
62, Issue 2 [Spring 1988]) draws out this generalization of Plato’s notion of participation from the consideration of four principle texts of Plato on the question of participation: Phaedo 100d-102b-d, Parmenides 131a-d, Sophist (numerous texts relating to the notion of exemplarity), Timaeus (numerous texts dealing with the problem of the “receptacle”, that is, the “participant” which is the receiver of participated reality from the Forms).
36 Cornelio Fabro, “The Intensive Hermeneutics of Thomistic Philosophy: The Notion of Participation,” The Review of
Metaphysics, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Mar. 1974), 449-491.
37 John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, D.C.:
having which sets up a structure of dependence such that material things participate in the Forms which are participated in, and thus the material things depend upon the Forms for their being.
1.2.2. Plato and analogy
Plato is the first Greek philosopher to employ the notion of analogy with philosophical force.38 As we have seen the idea of analogy is closely related to participation, and in fact Plato uses both the idea of analogy and of participation to explain the relationship between the world of matter and the world of ideas.39 For Plato the distinction seems to be mainly between the question of the relation between human knowledge and the eternal Ideas, in which case analogy is employed, and the relation between the existence of material things and the world of ideas, in which participation is employed, where the Ideas “are related to things as prototypes are to images.”40 Plato holds that concepts (λόγοι) are to the Forms (εἰδοί)as belief (πίστις) is to truth (ἀλήθεια).41 This pair of pairs ‘concept>Form’ and ‘belief>truth’ are analogous because the proportion of the first item in each pair to the second item in each pair is the same, and thus the two pairs are bound together by ‘analogy of proportionality.’
That the relation of knowledge to the Ideas, considered in the most general way, is seen in the genesis of the philosophical notion of analogy as it comes to Plato from Pythagorean
38 Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World: An Investigation of Its Background and Interpretation of Its Use
by Thomas of Aquino (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1953), 14.
39 Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World: An Investigation of Its Background and Interpretation of Its Use
by Thomas of Aquino (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1953), 22.
40 Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World: An Investigation of Its Background and Interpretation of Its Use
by Thomas of Aquino (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1953), 22.
41 This is argued by Hampus Lyttkens (The Analogy between God and the World: An Investigation of Its Background and
Interpretation of Its Use by Thomas of Aquino [Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1953], 24-25), who points to Timaeus 29b-c: “So accounts of what is stable (μονίμου) and fixed (βεβαίου) and transparent to understanding (μετὰ νοῦ καταφανοῦς) are themselves stable and unshifting (ἀμεταπτώτους). We must do our very best to make these accounts (λόγοις) as irrefutable (ἀνελέγκτοις) and invincible (ἀνικήτοις) as any account may be. On the other hand, accounts we give of that which has been formed to be like that reality (ἀπεικασθέντος), since they are accounts of what is a likeness (εἰκόνος), are themselves likely (εἰκότας), and stand in proportion (ἀνὰ λόγον) to the previous accounts, i.e., what being (οὐσία) is to becoming (γένεσιν), truth (ἀλήθεια) is to belief (πίστιν).”Cf. Timaeus 53e.
mathematical theory. The term itself, ἀναλογία42 is taken from the Greek mathematicians— traditionally called “Pythagoreans,”43 and as Aristotle notes it signifies the equality between two numerical proportions, a proportionality.44 There is a proportional relation between a set of numbers, and two sets of numbers admit of a “proportionality” when the proportion relation of each set is the same such that we can present “two couples of numbers interpreted in the same way.”45 For instance, the arithmetic proportion of 1:2 is the same as that of 3:6, such that there is an arithmetic proportionality between 1:2/3:6: the “distance” between the two pairs of numbers is the same by arithmetic proportionality, that of “double.” Analogy of proportionality “was designated ‘geometrical’ because it was discovered in connexion with the discovery of the irrational numbers, which could only be represented by geometrical figures. Proportionality made it possible to relate irrational numbers to rational numbers.”46 The analogy of proportionality came to be seen as more generally applicable to being, such that a non-directly
42 Derived from λόγος, a noun in the λέγειν (‘to speak/tell’) word group; ‘word’, ‘statement’, ‘account’, ‘concept’, ‘thought’,
‘reason’; and the prefix ἀνα: w/acc. ‘motion upward’; such that the term in its etymology signifies an ascent of the mind from one thing better known by us to something else less better known by us but more intelligible in itself, with the metaphysical overtone in Greek philosophy: one ascends the scale of being by comparing what is worldly to what is eternal, since the world is the shadow of the eternal made on the pattern of the eternal—the world is a ‘speculum enigmatum’ (1 Cor 13:12) of the theological realm. Thus analogical reasoning is a part of (or perhaps even in some sense synonymous with) “dialectic” in that dialectic proceeds from what is more known to us (logical intentions) to what is more known in itself, that is, being. And so the relation of logic and metaphysics, analogical reasoning and being (cf. Rudi A. te Velde, “Metaphysics, Dialectics, and the Modus Logicus According to Thomas Aquinas,” in Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale, Vol. 63 [1995], 15-35). Emerich Coreth (Metaphysics, New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), generally defines analogy as a dialectical mode of reasoning. “W]e see in human knowledge a steady dynamism which assumes the form of a dialectical process…Our knowledge can never be wholly conceptualized, it never catches up with its ultimate term. This dialectics of our knowledge about being is traditionally called the analogy of being” (110). The basic point is that a dialectical inquiry begins with what is known in a certain way, and yet obscure, and as knowledge progresses, more questions appear, thus the common wisdom ‘the more you know the more you know what (or better, that) you don’t know.’
43 Cf. Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World: An Investigation of Its Background and Interpretation of Its
Use by Thomas of Aquino (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1953), 15-16, incl. 15 fn4. Later Greek philosophers generally refer to the mathematicians as “Pythagoreans”, since Pythagoras is held to be the father of Greek mathematical thinking, and furthermore, any philosopher with a predilection for thinking about the cosmos in mathematical-geometrical terms is labelled by the Greeks a “Pythagorean.” Pythagoras himelf is a shadowy figure whom we only know about through the writings of others, and his reputation as the progenitor of Greek mathematics is so strong that other philosophers co-opted his myth-like authority by ascribing to him views of their own making. By “Pythagoreans” Aristotle seems to mean a certain set of contemporaries of Plato, academicians who dealt in mathematical-geometrical philosophy.
44 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1131a31 ff.
45 Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World: An Investigation of Its Background and Interpretation of Its Use
by Thomas of Aquino (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1953), 16.
46 Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World: An Investigation of Its Background and Interpretation of Its Use
comparable order of being can be compared indirectly to an order of being of which we have better knowledge: realities otherwise inaccessible to us due to their ontological distance from us can be reached by means of the analogy of proportionality.
The chief texts of Plato in which the concept of analogy is employed are the Timaeus and the
Republic. While he retains mathematical allusions in his use of the notion of analogy, we can see that Plato increasingly tends to an extension and ultimately transformation of the notion of analogy. Thus analogy in Plato begins to point to a more fundamental reality in the structure of being. In this way do the notions of analogy and participation begin to approach one another, insofar as analogy is concerned with the relation of knowledge in the material sphere to the eternal Ideas. The Platonic notion of analogy as regards intellectually formed concepts and “true concepts” (Forms) is a relation of partiality to fullness—a participatory relation. The formed concept is the image of the prototype (Form) such that the image is a mixture of truth and falsity, a mere approximation with admixture of error, to the prototype.47 The image thus bears in part, or has a share of, what the Idea/Form possesses absolutely, and so there is a fundamentally ontological aspect to Plato’s notion of analogy. To put this Platonic understanding in somewhat more Aristotelian and Thomistic terms, the Form has by essence (per essentiam) what the image has by participation (per participationem) in that Form.
In seeing the relation between analogy and ontological participation, we see better what Plato means by his general epistemological rule that true knowledge comes from turning away from the physical world to the world of Forms or Ideas.48 It is not that we must be blind to the physical world of images. Rather, by looking at the image we should be led to turn our gaze to
47 Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World: An Investigation of Its Background and Interpretation of Its Use
by Thomas of Aquino (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1953), 51.
48 Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World: An Investigation of Its Background and Interpretation of Its Use
the Form—the physical world sends us to the theological world. In the Republic Socrates holds that, while the Good cannot be spoken of directly it can be described by speaking of its “offspring.” And then there is the famous analogy of the Sun (Rep. 508b): the Sun is that offspring of the Good which is most like the Good itself.49 There is a similarity of function between the Sun and the Good. The Sun makes the visible available to the sense of sight, and likewise is the Good the cause of truth in intelligible objects and the source of knowledge in the mind (νοῦς) of the intelligent person. The Good is higher than the Ideas as it is the source of their truth in a way “like” (ἀνάλογον) the Sun is higher than the sensible objects. The term “analogon” is thus seen to stand for the relationship between two realities, where the realities themselves that are the subjects of the analogon are the ‘analogates.’ In the case of our example, the sun is the ‘prime analogate’ since it is the source of the qualities of the ‘secondary analogate,’ the sensible object.
1.2.3. The “grounding problem” in Plato: difficulties for his notion of participation
In Plato’s theory of Forms the “reduction of the many to One” is not in fact complete, but
only partial, since the realm of the Forms retains its multiplicity and the mutual distinctions of relation of any Form to any another,50 i.e., “men” are reduced to the Form of Man, but the Form of Man is still, in its oneness, different from other Forms. Thus the Forms in their multiplicity were fated to remain ungrounded (unreduced to one) in Plato, and so his idea of participation must remain obscure: a coherent metaphysical structure of participation cannot be brought forth until the relationship of the Forms to the One as their source and ground can be recognized and made metaphysically articulate. Regardless of the trajectory of reduction established by the
49 Plato, Rep. 508b-c: “The Sun (ὁ ἥλιος)…which the Good (τἀγαθὸν) begot (ἐγέννησεν) to stand as a likeness or proportion
(ἀνάλογον) to it.”
50 W. Norris Clarke, “The Problem of the Reality and Multiplicity of Divine Ideas in Christian Neoplatonism,” in Dominic J.
Founder of the Academy, a thematized reduction does not occur in Plato’s texts, and later interpreters and scholars have been left to argue about the nature of his metaphysical achievement on this question.
As Norris Clarke notes, Plato does tentatively advance a vision of the One and Good “as the source of both ideas and minds,” but it is not made clear whether the Good is itself mind or whether it is ontologically “above” mind.51 “The ultimate relation [of participation] between the world of ideas and mind remains unfinished business for Plato, a legacy for his successors to unravel.”52
1.3. Aristotle: the turn to the world: substantiality and formal immanence
The most brilliant disciple of Plato, Aristotle translates his master’s theory of Forms from a doctrine of separate existence into a doctrine of “immanence”: the form is the intrinsic cause of the characteristics of the substance or entity,53 οὐσία, which is the concrete thing that actually exists, sufficient and by itself (“κάθ᾽ αὑτά” or “per se”),54 as the “ground” (ἀρχή) of all non-self-sufficient categories of being.55 Forms are in the things themselves and constitute things in their
51 A locus classicus is the Timaeus, 29e-30d: “Let us now state the cause (αἰτίαν) wherefore he framed the whole universe (τὸ
πάν) of becoming. He was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free from jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible.” cf. Plato, Republic VI (509b); Aristotle, Metaphysics 1074b21-35.
52 W. Norris Clarke, “The Problem of the Reality and Multiplicity of Divine Ideas in Christian Neoplatonism,” in Dominic J.
O’Meara ed. Neoplatonism and Christian Thought (Norfolk, Va: International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, 1982), 110-111.
53 Joseph Owens (The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics: A Study in the Greek Background of Mediaeval
Thought, 2nd ed. revised [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1963] 138-154) cautions against an unreflective
English translation of ‘ousia’ to ‘substance’ when dealing with Aristotelian ousiology. Aristotle uses ousia as a catch-all term for ‘being’ but he will at any moment use it in any number of specialized ways as well, e.g., not infrequently it means ‘form.’ Our English word ‘substance’ with reference to its Latin derivation has the instant connotation in metaphysics of “something standing underneath.” Certainly Aristotle uses ousia in this way at times. After lengthy argumentation, Owens opts for “entity,” which in a most general way will always be at least not incorrect, whatever additional interpretation we may need to give to it. Lawrence Dewan (St. Thomas and Form As Something Divine in Things [Milwaukee, Wis: Marquette University Press, 2007], fn16 on 61), concurs with Owens, following him, no doubt.
54 Aristotle, Metaphysics VII () 1033b-1034a.
55 Cf. Werner Marx, Introduction to Aristotle’s Theory of Being as Being (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 18. “[O]usia is
the determining factor within the manifold meanings of on [ens]. For this reason Aristotle can also call ousia a “ground,” arche…Ousia is the ground in the sense that it bestows a particular ‘meaning of being’ upon each of the other categories. As such a ground, ousia is called ‘primary’; it is primary with regard to the logos (concept), to gnosis (cognition), and to chronos (time).”
being—they do not exist apart from things as separated hypostases. Aristotle does not so much tackle the problem of Platonic participation and its deeper logical and metaphysical troubles as much as he sidesteps it by refusing the hypostatization of the Ideas altogether. For Aristotle a separate Form is causatively impotent—only immanent forms can cause.56 From a certain angle Aristotle’s project appears to be in discontinuity with the Platonic project, since it may look as though, rather than seeking a further unification (grounding) of the multiplicity of the theological realm in some highest unity, he has simply denied the separate theological existence of the hypostases and turned to the immanence of form in primary substance (πρῶτα οὐσία).
But the truth of Aristotle’s view, as in Plato, is not so simple. In denying the hypostatic existence of the Forms Aristotle does not deny that they are real universals and therefore the true objects of science.57 Rather, the universal Forms have existence in things. The theory of abstraction that accompanies Aristotle’s immanentism is of a piece with his critical recognition that “the course of knowledge is not the literal replica of the development of things, and that the articulations of thought do not correspond entirely to real distinctions.”58 Yet, however much Aristotle demonstrates in his philosophy of immanence that he is a man of the world, in true
56 Aristotle, Metaphysics I () 9; and XIII-XIV (, , ). A summary of the arguments against the Platonic doctrine of Forms is
given in I,9: the central gist is that it is impossible to see how the Forms can actually be the cause of anything unless they are in matter, and therefore not separate (again, Eric Perl would think that Aristotle is not accurately representing Plato on this point: on Perl’s reading Plato’s forms are immanent because they obviously must be—Plato perhaps did not consistently explain himself well). Here Aristotle is referring to the notion of efficient causation, a notion for the absence (or at least absence of thematization) of which he reproaches Platonism in Meta. I (), 6 (988a, 8-9): “[Plato] has used only two causes (δυοῖν αἰτίαιν μόνον), that of the essence (τί ἐστι) and the material cause (τήν ὕλην).” The whole of books M and N (13 and 14) constitute an extended argument against the existence of separated Forms. An abbreviated version of the “tritos anthropos” objection is found in M 1076b-1077a15. Also see the discussion in Z 14 (1039a24-1039b5). Aristotle reads Plato like he does every other philosopher, which is to say, in terms of his own four-fold theory of causes (formal, final, material, efficient). Joseph Owens can be shown likely to agree with Perl on Aristotle’s deficient reading of Plato: “The Stagirite is a splendid talker, but a poor listener. Just as he read in his predecessors only imperfect developments of his own doctrines, so does he continue in a like inability to see a question from a medieval or a modern stand” (Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics: A Study in the Greek Background of Mediaeval Thought, 2nd ed. Revised [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1963], 11). 57 Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy: Greece and Rome, Image ed. Book I (New York: Image Books, 1985), 303;
orig. ed. Newman Press, 1962.
Platonic fashion he still regards “matter as the element which is impenetrable to thought,” looking instead to “pure form as the intelligible.”59
Aristotle makes a great show of rejecting Platonic participation,60 but as Fabro notes61 the Stagirite nevertheless introduces elements pertaining to the notion of participation (μέθεξις), if not the term itself, in his discussions, both in the Organon on universals (logical relations of individuals to species and species to genus),62 and on his doctrine of immanent formal causation in the Metaphysics. Aristotle’s critical reception of Plato goes through further refinement in
pagan (Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus/Liber de causis) and Christian (Augustine, Boethius, Ps-Dionysius, Eriugena) Neoplatonism.
1.3.1. Aristotle and Aquinas: the First Cause and participation
Crucial to note for our study of Aristotle is the consonance Aquinas sees in Aristotle’s notion of universal dependence of all things on the First Cause (πρωτή ἀρχή)63 with the Christian doctrine of Creation ex nihilo.64 The universal structure of causal dependency upon a first is most pithily expressed in Aristotle’s axiom “if there is no first [cause] there is no cause at all,”65 which Aquinas represents as “Whatever is first in any order is the cause of all that come after it.”66
59 Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy: Greece and Rome, Image ed. Book I (New York: Image Books, 1985), 306;
orig. ed. Newman Press, 1962.
60 Aristotle, Metaphysics I () 992a29-30: “[Plato’s] account of the way in which [the Forms] are the substances (οὐσίαι) of
perceptible things is empty talk (κενῆς λέγομεν); for ‘sharing’ (μετέχειν)…means nothing (οὐθέν ἐστιν).”
61 Cornelio Fabro, “The Intensive Hermeneutics of Thomistic Philosphy: The Notion of Participation (The Review of
Metaphysics, Vol. 27, No. 3 [Mar. 1974]), 449-491.
62 Aristotle, Topics IV, 1, 121a11 ff.
63 Aristotle, Metaphysics XII (), 6 (1072b-1073a12). This passage represents a locus classicus, an Aristotelian metaphysical
hymn to the First Cause: “If, then, God (ὁ θεὸς) is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder (θαυμαστόν); and if in a better state this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life (ζωὴ) also belongs to God; for the actuality (ἐνέργεια) of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent (καθ᾽ αὑτὴν) actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God” (1072b24-30).
64 Cf. James A. Weisheipl, “Thomas’ Evaluation of Plato and Aristotle” (The New Scholasticism 48, No.1 [1974], 100-124) for a
succint introduction on the question.
65 Aristotle, Metaphysics III () 994a19: “ὥστ᾽ εἴπερ μηδέν ἐστι πρῶτον, ὅλως αἴτιον οὐδέν ἐστιν.”
66 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIIa, q. 56, a. 1 resp. Cf. Summa Theologiae, Ia, q.2, a.3 resp. “Now the maximum in any genus
